Race and/as Technology - I

Abstract

n her seminal essay, “Race and/as Technology”, Wendy H. K. Chun proposed that race could be understood as a technology—that is, as neither biological nor cultural, human nor machine, mediated nor environmental, visible nor invisible, but as a category that organises all of these dualisms and many more. Race, she argued, can be thought of as a “technique that one uses, even as one is used by it” (38). Using this essay and its concerns as a touchstone, this panel will ask how we might understand race and/as technology in the present. What is the relationship between visibility/invisibility and race and how is it mediated? How are emergent technologies of control, such as facial recognition, racialised? How might we think categories—like race, person, or population—after Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and big data? How might these technologies be understood historically? What is the relationship to related categories, such as gender, class or ability, in the technologisation of race? How might analyses of culture help us to understand race and/as technology? If we adopt Chun’s idea that this approach “displaces ontological questions of race” (56), what different things might race be made to do, in the present? We want to bring together scholars working in any discipline touched by these questions to think through what it might mean to consider race and/as technology today.

Chair

• Scott Wark, University of Warwick

Individual Presentations

• Race as Film Technology - Julian Sverre Georg Bauer, Universität der Künste Berlin

• Alexa’s Whiteness - Thao Phan, Deakin Univeristy

• Pool Parties, Police Violence, and Viral Videos as Technologies of Race - Anne Pollock, King's College London

• "The New Technology is Black": Afronauts, Afrofutureneering, and the Racialization of a New Future’s Past - Rayvon Fouche, Purdue University

Session Organizers

• Thao Phan, Deakin Univeristy

• Scott Wark, University of Warwick